


Caretaker Tendency

by earlgreytea68



Series: Scotch [16]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-08
Updated: 2012-09-08
Packaged: 2017-11-13 19:02:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/506687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earlgreytea68/pseuds/earlgreytea68
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock doesn't much like Harry Watson.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Caretaker Tendency

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to chicklet73 for stepping in with a brilliant beta. I honestly can't recall if this went for a Britpick or not. If it did, all thanks to sensiblecat. If it didn't, please blame me for its Americanness. 
> 
> This is theoretically in the Scotch 'verse, sometime after "Tequila." However, it's really more of a standalone piece. I wrote it as a kind of character examination, hence its present-tense-ness, unlike everything else in the Scotchverse. All you really need to know, I think, is this is post-S2 and John and Sherlock are together.

Sherlock bothers to notice his surroundings because he is in need of a cup of tea. Tea is one of those things for which the need sometimes hits him suddenly. Like his violin. Or still, after all this time, much as he hates to admit it, every once in a while, a cigarette. Or John. 

He has been in a funk, because nothing interesting has been happening, and he has been sulking about that, and John has been ignoring him and nevertheless, Sherlock is quite aware, John would make a cup of tea if he requested. 

So he says it, staring into the fire. “We should have tea.”

“I’m not bloody making you tea,” a voice that is decidedly not John’s replies. 

Sherlock looks up, startled, at John’s sister, sitting on the couch and reading some sort of unimaginably terrible celebrity magazine. “Where’s John?” he demands. 

“He said he had to get us some food before we starved.”

Sherlock considers. This might be true; John has a distressing preoccupation with food. Sherlock blames it on his doctorly knowledge of proper nutrition, which is, it goes without saying, quite boring. “Why didn’t you go with him?” he asks, bluntly, because now that John is not there, he is annoyed that he’s not alone. If John isn’t going to be there, he’d much rather be alone. He’d especially rather not be with John’s self-destructive, stroppy sister who persists in being scathing toward him all the time; it’s quite tiresome and Sherlock wants to be left alone to his sulk, because it’s been quite a good sulk so far. 

“I didn’t want to go. And he couldn’t _make_ me go. He’s always thinking that he can _make_ me do things,” announces Harry, flatly. 

Sherlock knows all about older brothers who think they can make you do things, but he doesn’t want to bond with Harry at all and certainly not over anything that would draw similarities between John and Mycroft. He decides it’s better to go back to ignoring her and steeples his fingers together and looks back to the fire and tries to pull the comfort of his sulk around him like a blanket. 

He isn’t quite descended back into complete self-absorption, so he notices when Harry picks herself up and drops herself into John’s chair. 

Sherlock frowns at her. “That’s John’s chair.”

“You don’t like me,” Harry says, as if the sentence he just told her was not extremely important and should have caused her to vacate it immediately. 

“That’s John’s chair,” he says again. 

“I’m sure he won’t mind if someone else sharing the Watson DNA sits in it.”

“But _I_ mind,” Sherlock points out. 

“Why don’t you like me?”

“I don’t like anyone who isn’t John,” says Sherlock, which most of the time, he thinks, is true. 

“Watson DNA,” she remarks again, gesturing to herself. “It doesn’t work its magic on you when it’s in me as opposed to in John?”

Sherlock regards her. She doesn’t look much like John, really. They physically resemble each other as siblings in only the roughly approximate way he and Mycroft resemble each other as siblings, more a remnant of a shared upbringing than an actual overlapping of DNA. And, in all the ways that make John _John_ , she is nothing at all like him. Sherlock cannot think of anyone more the opposite of John, really. “It isn’t a matter of DNA,” he says, stiffly. 

“Oh, isn’t it? But John tells me you use science to explain _everything_. And isn’t attraction a matter of chemistry? Phenomes and stuff like that?”

“The word you’re looking for is ‘pheremones,’” Sherlock corrects. “And science can explain attraction, but it’s terrible at explaining love, and don’t think that doesn’t pain me to admit.”

“No, love’s completely irrational,” Harry agrees, leaning back in her chair and keeping her eyes, hard and unamused, sharp on him as if he has done her some sort of personal affront. “That I believe. After all, he loves you very much and that is completely inexplicable to me.”

“Because I’m a man?” asks Sherlock, bored, because surely Harry, with her string of female lovers, is not about to express disbelief that her brother has chosen a male mate. 

“No, because you’re an arrogant bastard who broke his heart. You came back from the dead and he took you back as if you’d had a silly row about who was going to do the washing up, and bully for him being so in love with you that he doesn’t hold you to any standards, but I was with him when he thought you were dead and I can’t forgive you so easily. Because I’ve been with him through everything, Sherlock, and I’ve never seen anything break him as much as you did, so casually, and then you show up and he bloody lets you in again, as if it were all _nothing_.”

Sherlock regards her. He has not changed his posture one iota, and he knows he looks languid and disinterested, because that is how he strives to look when he is really furious, which he is now. His fury is like flipping a switch: it rushes suddenly, and it is very quiet, not at all like the tantrums he regularly throws. It is much deeper and much less frequently indulged by him, but he lets himself feel furious now, because Harry is suffering under many misapprehensions of which he must disabuse her. “You weren’t with him,” he says, and he uses his voice, makes it cool and icy; he is not Mycroft Holmes’s younger brother for nothing. 

“Sorry?” says Harry, clearly too caught up in her own fury to fully grasp the enormity of the mistake she’s just made in goading him. 

“You weren’t with him, when he thought I was dead. I mean, you were, part of the time, when you were sober enough, but the rest of the time, you were drunk, and he was heartbroken, as you’ve already said, and instead of being someone he could turn to, someone he could trust, you most definitely were not there.”

Harry is white. “Who told you that?” she demands. “Did he say that?”

Sherlock scoffs. “He would never. And he doesn’t need to. You weren’t there for him when he thought I was dead, and you haven’t been there for him ‘through everything,’ as your grand revisionist history would have all of us believe, because he came back from a war, sad and lonely and wounded, and the only person who helped him through that was a stranger he’d just met. Oh, wait, I think that was me, wasn’t it?” Sherlock muses, dramatically, tapping his fingers against his mouth. 

Harry looks now as furious as Sherlock feels, and it is unattractive on her, the way it wrenches at her features. “Look at you,” she hisses at him, “so holier-than-thou about the whole thing. When we are so similar, you and I: broken, and demanding, and dramatic. We are cut from the same cloth; I bet you’ve never thought of that.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” says Sherlock, evenly, which makes her even more furious, he notes. “You’re quite right. John has a caretaker tendency. Obvious from his chosen career. He tends to prefer personal relationships in which the other half of the relationship needs care and attention. ‘Broken and demanding and dramatic.’ I might not have used those same words, but we are ‘cut from the same cloth,’ as you delightfully put it. John likes lost causes; John likes to save people, and that isn’t science, that’s Knowing John Watson, a subject which I have made it a habit of mine to study quite thoroughly. And you really ought to be more careful before you throw stones at others about breaking his heart, when I have now watched you break his more times than I wish to relate in the abbreviated conversation I currently consider us to be having. You should know, though, Harriet—” He bites at her name, making the “t” sharp and lethal at the end, letting the “rr” roll in a public school way— “I am not amused by anything or anyone which makes John unhappy, and that includes, most of the time, you, and very, _very_ seldomly me. I have never hurt him willingly, never hurt him when it was within my control not to, and you have done so multiple times now. So no. I don’t like you. I find that quite impossible. John continues to love you, and continues to harbor hope in his heart about you, and I do not like to see him sad and so I have lost whatever patience I might ever have had for you. Nothing would make me happier than to have you recover fully and listen to your brother and get back on your feet, because nothing would make _John_ happier than that. But as long as you do not, you and I are, I’m afraid, inexorable enemies. Does that answer your question?”

Harry stares at him, frozen, her hands curled into impotent fists in her lap and trembling slightly, because she needs a drink. Sherlock could have felt sympathy, if that were an emotion he generally allowed himself to feel, because he has gone through withdrawal and it’s unpleasant. But he is also aware that there is nothing in the universe he wouldn’t find a way to accomplish if John asked him to, and he has no respect for this woman who refuses to do the same. “What question?” she manages, through dry lips. 

“Why I don’t like you,” Sherlock clips out at her. 

“Sherlock,” cuts in John’s voice, from the doorway, and his tone is difficult to read. Half of it is chiding, but not John’s usual chiding tone, not entirely committed to it. 

Sherlock decides if John isn’t going to be fully committed to the chiding that he doesn’t really mean it. He looks across at him and says, blandly, “Fantastic. I wanted a cup of tea.”

John looks between the two of them, hesitant and indecisive, and then says, slowly, “…Right. Cup of tea.”

He disappears into the kitchen with his bag of groceries. 

Sherlock settles into his chair and steeples his fingers again and looks back into the fire and finds the room in his Mind Palace devoted to John. Because he must catalog exactly how John reacts when he walks in on Sherlock explaining why he doesn’t like Harry Watson. 

***

Harry is staying with them. Sherlock, of course, does not approve of this, and John _did_ ask him if it was all right, but Sherlock could not very well have said to John, _No, it’s not all right, throw her out on the street_. Sherlock would have done this with any other person on the planet, but he could not do it to anyone important to _John_. John’s face would crumple and he would be sad and disappointed and Sherlock has made it a personal experiment of his to see how long he can go without making John sad and disappointed. He is aiming for a length of time akin to “the rest of their lives.” He’s not sure he’s going to make it that long if Harry continues to stay with them. But John is trying to enforce her sobriety, and Sherlock is trying not to start an argument over it and trying to ignore the situation as much as possible. 

So John is upstairs settling Harry into the room that used to be John’s. They haven’t had a bed in that room in a while, but John has found some sort of camping sleeping apparatus that Mrs. Hudson had for reasons Sherlock said he did not want to know (because he already knew they involved an outdoorsy boyfriend of hers from years ago), and John is upstairs settling her, and Sherlock is considering playing the violin because he knows it will annoy Harry and he really, genuinely does not like Harry and her effect on John. John is most definitely the strongest human being Sherlock has ever met, but Harry makes him behave with a brittle fragility, as if she has the power to shatter him at any moment, and Sherlock disapproves of this, Sherlock wants to find a way to wrap John in cotton wool and make it so that no one, least of all Harry, will ever hurt him again. 

Sherlock reaches for his violin, just as John’s steps sound on the staircase. He waits, holding his violin, to see if John is going to go to bed or come back into the lounge. Sherlock is half-convinced John is going to go to bed without speaking to him. Sherlock doesn’t think John is angry with him, but he does think John is feeling overwhelmed enough by the whole situation not to want to talk to Sherlock. Sherlock is aware this is the sort of situation where he usually says something truthful and accurate that John inevitably finds _not helpful_ , as John puts it. 

John pauses in the lounge doorway and looks at Sherlock’s violin. “What are you doing?” he asks. 

“I’m going to play the violin for a bit,” Sherlock answers, innocently. “Any requests?”

“You can’t play the violin. Harry is trying to sleep.”

“She’s not going to sleep tonight. She might appreciate the accompaniment.”

John regards him, his teeth worrying at his lip, his bearing stiff and military in that way it gets when John is uncertain about something, when he feels the need to fall back on the command in his past. “Do you think she’ll…I don’t know…sneak out tonight?”

“John, people don’t sneak around _my_ flat,” Sherlock points out. 

John walks over to him and takes the violin out of his hands. Sherlock doesn’t try very hard to stop him. “Stand up, would you?” John asks him, turning slightly to put the violin down on his chair. 

Sherlock eyes him warily. “Why?”

“Because I want you to.”

Which is a failsafe way to get him to do anything, and the thing about John is he both knows this and doesn’t exploit it nearly as much as Sherlock would in John’s position. 

Sherlock stands, trying to anticipate what John’s about to do. He doesn’t anticipate what John does do, which is to close his hands in Sherlock’s lapels and jerk him forward into a fierce, bruising kiss. Sherlock makes a noise caught between surprise and pleasure and kisses him back for a minute before breaking the kiss. 

“I thought you might be angry with me,” he begins. 

“Shut up,” says John, and kisses him again, pulling at him now, and Sherlock follows the command, walks, heading them toward the lounge doorway, and they only jostle into the table a little bit. Sherlock reaches out a hand, nudging them past it without losing focus on the world-class snogging he and John are currently engaged in. “I am going to shag you past every thought in that ridiculous head of yours,” John gasps at him, and Sherlock half-stumbles, just managing to catch a hand on the doorjamb before they both tumble into a heap. 

“Oh,” Sherlock realizes. “You’re the _opposite_ of angry with me.”

In answer, John uses his grip on Sherlock’s lapels to back him against the wall in the hallway, pressing into him, and Sherlock decides it wouldn’t be the first time they’ve gone a bit too far in a place a bit too accessible to Mrs. Hudson and hooks a leg around John’s hip, pulling him even closer, and gives himself over to John doing an admirable job of at least _snogging_ him past every thought in his head. 

John moves suddenly, straightening away from him and dislodging the position of his leg, and his hand closes into Sherlock’s, pulling him the last few steps into their bedroom. He shuts the door with a bit more force than is quite necessary, and Sherlock is about to say something about having alerted the entire building to their current activities, but instead he finds himself half-flung against the door, John working at his belt buckle. 

“Bloody hell,” Sherlock says, dazedly, because John can be enthusiastic but John is seldom quite like _this_. “What is this _for_?”

“When you play the violin in the middle of the night, it’s bloody annoying,” says John, efficiently unzipping his trousers. 

“You’ve said,” manages Sherlock. John’s eyes are on his hands and their activities, and it’s disconcerting to Sherlock, because John normally really enjoys eye contact during things like…whatever this is. Which might, Sherlock acknowledges, be something entirely new. 

“Do you know why I put up with it?” asks John, and tugs Sherlock’s trousers so they puddle at his ankles. 

“You love me,” Sherlock answers, watching John’s thumbs hook into the waistband of his pants. 

“Yes,” says John, and pulls at his pants a bit more carefully than he’d handled his trousers and then drops unceremoniously to his knees. 

Sherlock stares down at him, studying Sherlock’s erection with what Sherlock thinks of as his Captain Watson determination. “Is this about the violin?” he asks, in disbelief, because John is making even less sense than he usually does. 

“Shut up,” says John, and closes his mouth over him, and Sherlock knows that John adores this, the ability he has to make Sherlock Holmes shut up, and Sherlock quite likes it as well, because only John has ever been able to do this to him, really. John had been self-conscious at first when it came to the sex, uncertain, and Sherlock had understood that in a detached way and had also thought it the silliest thing ever, because he had never in his life understood why anyone made any sort of fuss about sex until he’d met John, and John had taught him that long before they had been anything other than flatmates. 

John pulls off suddenly, says words Sherlock can’t really be bothered to hear. 

“John,” he complains, thickly, and uses his hands in John’s hair to nudge him back toward the problem at hand. “Keep…” But he trails off because John needs no more direction and Sherlock never really knows what it is that he says when he climaxes but he suspects that it usually involves John’s name because John almost always looks smug afterward the way he’s looking right now. 

Sherlock can’t even feel self-conscious about collapsing to a heap on the floor. It is the very definition of impossible to keep himself upright any longer. He tips his head back against the door behind him and closes his eyes. 

John grumbles something that sounds like, “I should have stopped to get a pillow,” and settles himself against the door with Sherlock, directly next to him, because Sherlock likes contact after an orgasm and John knows that and Sherlock loves him so much he’s dizzy. 

“That was your own fault,” Sherlock points out. “What did you say to me? Before. You said something to me.”

“I asked if you were still thinking. And I guess I definitely have my answer to that question.”

“What was that _about_?” asks Sherlock, opening his eyes and turning his head to look at him. 

“Nothing,” says John, in an obvious lie. “You. And this shirt. You know I love this shirt. Plum is your color.”

Sherlock traces John’s profile with his eyes and responds, dryly, “Thank you, Connie Prince.”

John chuckles and shifts, leaning against him until his head is settled on Sherlock’s shoulder, and Sherlock is curious but also warm and content and maybe now is not the time to try to puzzle through more of John Watson’s oddities. 

“I have never thought of you as a lost cause,” says John, suddenly. “Is that how you think of yourself? I think you’re…brilliant. You know I think that.”

 _Ah_ , thinks Sherlock. “A difficult man to share a flat with,” he answers, “who brought you to a murder scene first thing, with a brother who kidnapped you almost immediately. There was not a single person, before you, who would think to fall in love under such circumstances. I would say, yes, that made me a lost cause. Yet here we are. How much did you overhear?” He wishes John would sit up so he could see him properly but he also doesn’t want to dislodge him from his position against his shoulder. 

“I don’t know,” John answers. “Enough. I really ought to be furious with you.”

“For what?”

John huffs impatiently. “For being ‘inexorable enemies’ with my sister. And, worse, for _telling_ her that.”

“Well,” remarks Sherlock, after a moment, “you’re clearly _not_ furious with me, so…”

“I can’t help that she’s my sister, Sherlock. I can’t help that…”

“Have I asked you to?” asks Sherlock, mildly. 

John snorts. “Not in so many words. I thought you were jealous, though.”

“Jealous?” Sherlock hopes he says the word as if it has never occurred to him to be jealous of every single human being John looks at who is not him. Of every _object_ John looks at that is not him. 

“I thought that was why you disliked her. I thought you were jealous of her, that every once in a while there was someone I was paying attention to who wasn’t you. That’s what I thought it was. And it isn’t that at all, is it? Not really. You wouldn’t care who I was paying attention to, so long as it made me happy. Would you?” John shifts now, sitting up, blocking the moonlight from the window so that he is silhouetted and his expression is mostly in darkness but Sherlock can tell he is studying his face closely. 

“I would rather,” Sherlock says, carefully, knowing that it is true and hoping that it is acceptable, “that you spend every single minute in my presence. But I would be willing to sacrifice some of that time for anything that might make you happy.”

“You make me happy,” John tells him. “You’re the most infuriating _force_ I’ve ever encountered, and I don’t bloody care if you think you’re a lost cause and that this is all just some mad manifestation of this caretaker tendency I have, I have never been happier in my entire life. Even with everything with Harry…I’ve never been happier, Sherlock.” John leans forward, kisses him quickly and chastely. 

Sherlock catches a hand on the back of his neck before he can quite move away from him, looks straight into the dim gleam of John’s eyes. “John,” he says, firmly. “Never let me make you unhappy. Promise me.”

“You couldn’t,” John tells him. 

“Yes, I could. Don’t be naïve. I make you happy, the inverse is necessarily true. Never let me do it to you. Go, before we reach that point. Remember…this, and all the rest of the good of it, but not… Don’t let me ruin it.”

“Sherlock Holmes,” he says. “Do you love me?”

“You know very well that’s not at all accurate for the way I feel about you.”

“As long as that is true, you will not ruin this, and I will not leave you. Now.” He leans forward, into another kiss, letting his lips curve into a smile against his. “Stop talking like a lost cause. I find lost causes irresistible.”

**Author's Note:**

> Those of you who are Scotchverse fans, thank you for coming along for the ride! This is the last of the Scotchverse fics for a little while. I've got one other fic that, like this one, might fit into the 'verse but is really more of a standalone fic. The next thing I'll post is the Schoolboy Saga (not its official name), which I meant to be a quick little thing about an eleven-year-old Sherlock Holmes and which somehow turned sprawling. I hope you Scotchverse fans will stick with me for it, because, I admit, I'm kind of a little bit in love with the fic...


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